FaceTime Offers Security, Compliance, Archival for Social Media

Bankers at a recent event all concluded that listening to, if not responding to, customers in social media venues is critical for banks. Yet compliance and security concerns naturally persist.

Today, FaceTime Communications released enterprise software for moderating, policing and archiving social media content. Unified Security Gateway 4 lets users pre-approve social media posts to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to prevent data leaks and violations of company policy and archive social media content for e-discovery. This latter feature can be helpful in meeting FINRA requirements for e-discovery (including the need for broker/dealers to archive all customer communications made over social media).

Use of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook can provide opportunities for banks to resolve customer problems and attract news customers. But it can also lead to data leakage and compliance violations.

“Most companies have more to fear from accidental data leakage on social media sites than malicious theft,” said Kailash Ambwani CEO of FaceTime, in a statement. “Individuals and teams within all sizes of organizations are turning to social media to collaborate, often without considering the consequences of collaborating in what is in effect a public place. Even the most diligent of employees can make the occasional error in judgment, which can have serious consequences if not prevented.”

FaceTime’s USG enables organizations to monitor and control how employees use specific features within social media sites; for example, allowing users to only view Twitter messages but not post, update a Facebook status but not play Farmville or post to LinkedIn but not be able to recommend.

“Moderator” controls allow organizations to hold status updates and comments for review prior to posting, thus complying with rules from regulatory bodies such as FINRA, OTS and the FSA, all of which have made clear that social media constitutes electronic messaging and that applicable rules and guidelines must be adhered to.

As a moderated user posts a message to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, USG intercepts the message and notifies the user that their content will be posted only upon approval by the moderator. Moderators then approve, comment upon or reject and block posts from the USG Review Console. Approved posts are immediately visible on the social media site.

All traffic, both inbound and outbound, can be scanned for confidential or restricted content ensuring that the use of social media in the workplace is not creating a back door for confidential and business critical data to leak out.

The software also provides integration with corporate directory services for authentication; Identity management for mapping social network user names to corporate identities; and export of logged content to WORM storage or email archiving systems for compliance retention and e-discovery.

Social Networking Compliance control is available as a USG module from $4,800 for 100 users on a virtual appliance with the first year maintenance and support.